There exists a whole indus­try of people out there who legally break into build­ings and computer systems for money, paid by the people who own the build­ings and make the systems.

One would think that the students who grow up to be cool hack­ers would be the computer science students. They have a coding back­ground, an abil­ity of under­stand­ing a prob­lem and how to solve it, and the capa­bil­ity to do it all quickly. The IB timed writ­ings were secretly train­ing for the biggest fights of their life… or so they’d wish. 

Would it be the theatre kids, whose entire thing is lying to people from a stage, who end up being skilled manip­u­la­tors? They can keep cool under pres­sure, they have bril­liant acting skills, and they can create convinc­ing char­ac­ters in an instant… but that’s prob­a­bly not how things would turn out.

See, not every kid cares about acting in a play or coding on comput­ers. But there is an inter­sec­tion there, and it’s a bit of a reach — people who need to lie to their teach­ers to stay out of trou­ble, who are incred­i­bly dedi­cated to getting things to work, and who couldn’t live a day with­out doing what they do. It’s simple, really:

Gamers.

Ever since comput­ers were put in schools, students have found ways to game on them. Initially, there wasn’t much that teach­ers and school admin­is­tra­tors could do to stop them, because the tools to do so were either expen­sive, hard to use or non-exis­tent. Kids could just get “admin access” or liter­ally hack their computer to get access to Quake or Doom (both of which are games older than all of The Verdict’s staff), or in later years, Minecraft. But as schools have started taking apart their infra­struc­ture and piece-by-piece moving it to the cloud, under the control of large corpo­ra­tions and central­ized manage­ment, that fight has gotten harder and harder. Federal and state laws went on the books in the early 2000s that forced school districts to block adult content on school prop­erty, so schools bought systems from suppli­ers that promised to make them “compli­ant”— mean­ing “able to follow the laws.” 

School districts real­ized that this new ecosys­tem of tools could also get rid of some other prob­lems on their hands, mainly piracy and student distrac­tion, so they began to use the tools to moni­tor and block those. A whole cultural thing has grown out of their use of these tools, and it’s ended up in the phrase “School Wi-Fi” gener­ally mean­ing a slow, unre­li­able inter­net connec­tion that doesn’t let students “get stuff done.” Even if the Wi-Fi is fast, reli­able and rela­tively lax on the filter­ing, even if the “School Wi-Fi Prob­lem” isn’t even really a prob­lem, it still gets the bad rap, because the people who want to game in school can’t use it, and they make up the section of the student body that cares about this the most. 

In some cases, these tools do really slow the inter­net down for people who aren’t view­ing anything they shouldn’t, espe­cially if they’re set up wrong or are applied too broadly. Some­times, in the name of fight­ing student distrac­tion, they block the websites that allow students to commu­ni­cate with each other and post to club accounts on social media, lead­ing to people avoid­ing the Wi-Fi entirely (which is tech­ni­cally against the rules, but is never enforced) and prevent­ing the blocks from being effec­tive at all. Entire apps and services such as VPNs have sprung up around letting people bypass “School Wi-Fi.” 

Lead­ing up to 2022, more and more students turned to down­load­ing games using their school comput­ers in an effort to get around the inter­net restric­tions. Some used browsers that had built-in VPNs to let them bypass the inter­net filter. Some pirated games such as Cuphead, Minecraft and Five Nights at Freddy’s. But FCPS was ulti­mately able to stop it all by using a system built into Windows called AppLocker, which only allows apps approved by the district to run.

Of course, this is start­ing to matter less and less, because FCPS is moving to Chrome­books and the Google Work­space plat­form for student devices. But the kids have still found ways to game.

The Verdict has done exten­sive research into hundreds of student-run websites that promote “unblocked games,” and has made contact with several of their authors. To summa­rize — it’s juicy. Alle­ga­tions have been made. The stakes couldn’t be higher. All that’s left for the kids to do is hide in plain sight, hoping to rock each other’s worlds with­out rock­ing the boat. Maybe forever. Stay tuned.